Higher Ground

By James Nolan

Five months after a hurricane has devastated New Orleans, native Nicole Naquin is home for the first time in decades. She's living next door to her mother Miss Gertie, an elderly evacuee from Lakeview reduced to pushing pills in a French Quarter gay bar. On the day Nicole's brother is killed in a drive-by shooting, she crashes the car into her high

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781935754381

James Nolan

James Nolan is a former United Nations Interpreter, where he retired with the rank of Deputy Director of the Meetings and Publishing Division (which encompasses the Interpreting and Verbatim Reporting Services). He also served as Director of Language Services of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. He is the author of Interpretation: Techniques and Exercises (Multilingual Matters, 2012) and has extensive experience in training interpreters.

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I. Chain Reaction

One

THAT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, WHEN Nicole rammed her navy-blue Saturn into a FEMA trailer, she was driving on new meds with a tombstone in the back of the car.

In the morning she’d borrowed a dolly from Tony’s Superette at the corner and hired Hunter, the tattooed delivery boy, to meet her at the cemetery to help load the damn thing into her car. Naquin. Hers was a common New Orleans surname, and six generations of almost illegible inscriptions were crowded onto the cracked marble tablet, now stained nicotine-yellow by the floodwaters. Her father’s name and dates were carved in the second-to-last space. Nicole had mentally reserved the next place on the tombstone for her seventy-six-year-old mother. At the moment, Nicole couldn’t imagine who else could possibly take that last slot.

Before the end of the day, she would find out.

But now, on top of everything else that would go wrong today, she was stranded with a flat at the only gas station left open in Lakeview. The lone attendant was rolling the punctured tire toward her, holding up a squat silver nail. Stoop-shouldered, he dragged his feet like someone working on a chain gang.

Lady, you picked up a roofing nail, he crowed, as if he’d discovered a tumor. Another little present from FEMA.

Nicole grimaced. She never told people where she worked, unless she had time for an hour-long tirade against the government. She felt like someone in the French Resistance secretly working for the Nazis, or a Creole collaborating with the Union army in occupied New Orleans. But the job with FEMA was the only one she could get. How long will it take to fix it? She glanced at his name badge. Hewitt.

Hewitt spat, pink gums flashing in his tire-blackened face, then gestured to a mountain of rubber in the corner of the garage, next to the Pepsi machine. You see all them other tires what got roofing nails? They lying all over the road now. Use ’em to tack up the blue tarps so it don’t rain in people’s houses. He eyeballed her Texas license plate. This city is a crying shame.

You don’t have to tell me, Hewitt. She was relearning how to get things done in her torpid hometown: mention your mother, tell an interesting story, and call the person by name. During the storm my momma lost her house in Lakeview where she’d lived for fifty years and now she’s camping out in the French Quarter and driving me up the wall, as if my crazy brother weren’t enough. Now if I don’t get this tombstone back to her—

Tombstone? He shaded his eyes with stubby fingers covered with grime to peek into the back of the SUV.

During the storm the slab fell off our tomb in Lafayette Cemetery like a broken oven door. She pointed through the tinted hatchback window. My daddy is buried in there.

He stared farther into the car. Look, lady—

Call me Nicole, she said. I grew up here in Lakeview. My momma has been coming to this station since Bienville landed. You must know Gertie Naquin, a sweet, yacky old lady with gray corkscrew curls. Nicole belonged, one of the few pleasures left to her in this town. She had a past here, if not a present. So fix the damn tire already.

Miss Gertie. Sure I know her. He screwed up his face, catching Nicole’s eye. So how’d you do?

This was the question on the tips of everyone’s tongues. She had figured out that it didn’t mean how are you? but rather how much of your life did you lose in the hurricane? Momma’s house got eight feet of water, she said, taking a deep breath, and the day after the levees broke, the Coast Guard rescued her from the second floor, then they bused her to the Astrodome in Houston, and she came to stay with me in Austin while I was breaking up with my husband. So then three months ago we both moved into this shotgun double in the Quarter, you know, her on one side, me on the other—

"Mean you moved here after the storm. For what ? He rolled his eyes. Kicks?"

She let out a shrill laugh and turned red, shaking her head like a ragdoll. Yeah, after twenty-eight years away, I picked now to come home. Smart, wouldn’t you say? And if you don’t fix my tire I’m going to break down crying and won’t stop until I rust every scrap of metal in this place.

Okay, I’ll put the spare on, and you can come back next week for this thing. He bounced the flat tire. Only don’t run over no more roofing nails, hear? With a weary whistle, he swung open the hatchback, yanked out the spare, and crouched next to it.

Hewitt? Nicole couldn’t stop herself. When she was little, that was how Uncle Alfonse, a tug boat mechanic, used to whistle whenever he’d come over to fix an air conditioner, and while he worked he’d let her hand him the tools. She knew her question might take all afternoon, but she really wanted to know.

Yeah? Hewitt’s sky-blue eyes blinked up at her from a smudged face.

How’d you do?

He blinked again, shaking his head.

In the storm, I mean, she said. Did you get much water?

Lemme show you something. He hoisted up his turnip-shaped body.

Without uttering a word, he led her to the back lot of the gas station, where a rusted Impala was parked on a weedy patch of cracked asphalt. When he popped open the door, Nicole peered inside. The back seat was made into a bed, piled with pillows and blankets, and the front seat was a nest of dirty clothes. From the dashboard he retrieved a violet velveteen slipper caked with mud, resting next to a toothbrush and tube of Crest.

My mama was in that nursing home over in Chalmette they didn’t bother to evacuate, he said, handing Nicole the slipper. She was tied into her wheelchair account of her bum back, so she wouldn’t slide out. The night before the storm I told her, ‘Mama, come with me, we’ll drive to Picayune to stay by cousin Ferrel’s,’ but she was worried about her dialysis. When the National Guard let me in that place two weeks later, this was all I could find of her. Still have nightmares about brown water inching up over her face.

Nicole looked at the moldy slipper in her hand, and then back at Hewitt. Tears welled in her eyes. I don’t know what—

That’s okay, he said, taking the slipper and placing it back on the dashboard. Not much anyone can say at this point. Tell Miss Gertie that Hewitt over by the gas station is still kicking. Told me she had a daughter somewhere off in Texas. Welcome home.

• • •

As Nicole swerved onto West End Boulevard, the crumbling tombstone shifted behind her, and she reached back to steady it. Barreling along past a thicket of picket signs advertising roof repair and house gutting and mold abatement, she felt giddy and lightheaded. She wasn’t sure if it was because the tire was changed or because the Zoloft was finally kicking in.

She never thought she’d need antidepressants here in festive New Orleans. But the divorce had been like flossing her teeth compared to coping with this broken city, an ashen expanse of dark, abandoned streets lined with boarded-up houses and patrolled by Humvees filled with National Guardsmen shouldering M-16s. Most of these decaying shells still had the ominous red X of the rescuers spray-painted next to their doors, as if the biblical Angel of Death had passed over them, marking the number of the living and the dead. Only a third of the former residents had returned, mostly to the historic neighborhoods perched along the sliver of higher ground that banked the Mississippi River. The bowl of reclaimed swampland that made up the modern city was now a tundra of phantasmal ruins. It was as if Nicole’s blue Saturn were spinning around inside the grainy black-and-white war footage of bombed out Dresden. Suddenly turning a corner, the sight could make her heart stop.

Leave it to her gynecologist ex-husband to demand a divorce the day after the most destructive storm in American history slammed into New Orleans, precisely at that moment when she’d had one eye glued to the CNN coverage while with the other she was searching the Internet for her mother’s name posted among the thousands on refugee lists.

Can’t you see I’m busy, Buster? That was the only response she could muster at the moment. After she located her mother and flew her to their house, what Buster had told her sank in. In a nutshell, he was kicking her out. While her mother spent the morning in the bathroom soaking her weary old bones in all the hot water the state of Texas had on tap, the couple had it out.

So who is this skanky twat you’ve been seeing? Nicole sputtered, slamming down the coffee pot. Don’t you get enough of that during office exams?

Pam and I are going to be married as soon as I can disentangle myself from—

And how long have you been sneaking around screwing Miss Cuntley?

About as long as you and I snuck around while I was married to my first wife.

That did it.

Nicole had blamed herself. She just didn’t feel sexy or pretty anymore. Whenever she studied herself in a full-length mirror, what she saw was Mrs. Frump, no matter how much she moisturized or waxed or spun like a manic hamster on the stationary bicycle in her Austin garage. Her spiky hair was tinted bronze—she could never get the color right—and her porcelain complexion webbed with fine lines like antique china. Sure, her plump, wide-hipped friends told her she was the original Heroin Chic model, so gaunt, wispy, and flat-chested. But look at them. She felt most herself dressed in teenage boy’s clothes from off the rack at the Gap, like a ragamuffin David Bowie with Orphan Annie eyes. Now there she was, forty-six, childless, and snake-bit, just another middle-aged ex-Mrs. Doctor from the Texas burbs.

Boy, I thought I had problems, her mother had said, toweling the hair that hadn’t been washed since the day her kitchen flooded up to her second chin. Sorry, but I couldn’t help but overhear. Nicole and Buster had been screaming at each other in the breakfast nook for an hour.

Momma, don’t. . . . Nicole was melting into a puddle, sobbing from every pore.

Just throw out the no good bum and redecorate. Gertie Naquin dried her daughter’s face with the damp bath towel.

"It’s his house. And I signed a prenup, remember? According to which, even the goddamn Cuisinart is his. Her wheezing sobs turned into a screech. After fifteen years, all I’ve got is the clothes on my back."

That makes two of us.

All Nicole kept from her marriage was the Saturn, in which she was now bowling along past the mounds of fetid debris on Mouton Street on a final Saturday errand, to look for Momma’s potting trowel and watering can. Her mother had discovered these rusted treasures in the wash shed the last time she went to visit the ruins of her house. Of all things, her momma was starting a garden. Mrs. Naquin had lost her antique furniture and, what was worse, the albums with family pictures going back to the 1880s.

If I can’t have my old memories back, looks like I’ll have to grow me some new ones, her mother had told her this morning, trellising a potato vine up a post on her side gallery. She was dressed in Salvation Army clothes, camping out alone in three sparsely furnished rooms with her crippled dachshund, Schnitzel. Never ever during Nicole’s booze-fueled, teen-aged daydreams while ratting the Quarter, could she have pictured that one day she would live next door to her mother on Dauphine Street. That some day she might live close to her brother Marky, maybe.

But poor Marky, now that was another story.

So far, hardly anyone in her mother’s Lakeview neighborhood had come back, although occasionally Nicole spotted the white breadbox of a FEMA trailer squatting in a driveway or in front of a house, mounted on six cinderblock pillars. If you asked her, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was a government bureau dreamed up in some lost chapter of Alice in Wonderland. But the job was all she could scrounge up in a city where few businesses had reopened. So from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. every weekday, she was now a Debris Removal Monitor. That meant she counted the dump trucks hauling the mountains of trash from the sites where people were gutting their houses. Bored out of her gourd, watching the parade of trucks lumber by heaped with bulging plastic sacks, she dubbed herself Miss Glad Bag.

What a perfect job for somebody thrown away.

She was suddenly grateful to be back on four solid wheels and couldn’t wait to get home to her mother’s oil-cloth covered kitchen table. She didn’t know what to say to Hewitt or to anyone else in this city. When she heard their hurricane sagas, she’d fight back tears, her mouth would flap open, but no words would come out. And the stories were everywhere. Hewitt’s was now roiling around in her mind with Momma’s and her own Job-like tales of tribulation. You worked hard, paid your bills, ate plenty of fiber, drank eight glasses of water a day, and then in a flash, everything you once recognized as your life was gone.

Vanished.

That makes two of us.

A whole city of us.

As her car lurched though the open crater of a pothole, the dolly rattled in the back of the SUV and the marble slab shifted again, sliding from its position propped between two boxes. Then the massive stone toppled, crushing the boxes and crashing against the dolly. At that moment, she was sucking from a plastic water bottle in her right hand. These new pills made her so thirsty. And when she lifted her other hand from the steering wheel to reach back and steady the stone—for just one second—she felt the jagged edges of the two splintered fragments. Her mother would throw a fit.

Then before she knew it, the car veered toward a FEMA trailer parked at the curb, slamming to a sudden halt with a resounding crash.

• • •

Kelly Cannon used to have a great sense of humor. He really did. Everybody said so. That is, until his Lakeview house flooded with five feet of water and his wife Lena decided to stay put in their FEMA apartment in Houston. Now he only communicated with her by cell phone and had just moved into the FEMA trailer parked in front of what was left of their house.

Yeah, Lena, the trailer is finally set up, he barked into the cell. Even have the key. Call the Pope, it’s a miracle.

While Kelly wrestled with crumbling sections of Sheetrock, he shouted into the cell cradled in his shoulder. I finally moved out of the Star Lite Motel, and in a few minutes I’ll take my first shower in the trailer. Now I’m not gonna try and fool you, babe. Place is a stinking mess. But you know something? Boy, it’s good to be home.

Lena now had a part-time job in Houston and showed no signs of wanting to help Kelly claw his way through the muck. Get a grip, was what she had to say. New Orleans is over.

Kelly was dressed in a smudged orange T-shirt and black cargo pants, yellow rubber gloves rolled up to his elbows. With his graying carrot top, freckled pumpkin face, and gauze mask yanked over his forehead so he could talk on the cell, he looked like an overgrown trick-or-treater costumed as a septic-tank cleaner. Moving through the house, he crunched underfoot what had once been the layer of slime covering the carpeting, now dried and cracked into a surface resembling elephant skin. It was the end of January and the weather had stayed cool, but the leaf-mold stink was more suffocating than ever. Several times this afternoon, he gagged and ran coughing outside for gulps of fresh air. With its blackened walls and moldering furniture, the house was a seething compost heap, a sty of bacterial sludge and rampant fungi blooming in jazzy pastel patterns. Jackson Pollock couldn’t have done a better job with the kitchen. But Kelly was adamant about rebuilding. This was their home, for Christ’s sake, where they had raised their two kids. He couldn’t just leave it to rot. That would be like letting his mama die of gangrene in a ditch.

The trailer really is comfortable, he said, dragging a mound of Sheetrock shards toward the door on a plastic tarp. It has a built-in double bed, and the cutest kitchenette, like a doll house. I feel like the Jolly Green Giant knocking around inside, but—

A crash resonated from outside, as if a truckload of empty steel drums had hit the pavement all at once.

Gotta go, Kelly spit into the cell. Something just collapsed.

He spun around and raced out the front door.

And then couldn’t believe his eyes.

The front end of his trailer had been knocked off its cinderblock pilings and was now jutting at a forty-five degree angle into the air, one whole side wrinkled like cellophane. The hood of a blue Saturn was buried halfway into the buckled wall of what was going to be his bedroom.

Kelly stood there paralyzed, his mouth hanging open in a cavernous O.

Holy shit, he muttered.

A skinny woman with a blondish pixie cut stood frozen next to the SUV, shaking her head and rubbing her slumped shoulders as if she were freezing. Slowly a stark paraffin face, melted into a mime-like grimace, turned to meet his glare.

Then the two figures floated toward each other like dissonant dancers.

That your car? Kelly demanded.

No. I mean yes. Actually, it belonged to—

May I fucking inquire why it’s rammed into my trailer?

The woman slid down onto the sidewalk next to a heap of mildewed carpeting and then curled up on her side into a ball like a doodlebug.

What kind of nut case? Look, I just got that trailer set up and was about to take my first shower, and. . . .

Kelly dropped to the sidewalk beside her and swiped his eyes with gloved hands, as if trying to wipe away the vision of the wreck in front of him. When he looked up, the crumpled trailer was still there. The loopy dame was still there. And he felt as if he were back under the floodwaters, a primordial ooze against which it seemed pointless to fight. I’m going under, he admitted to himself.

Big sink hole ahead.

For five minutes they said nothing.

Early evening shadows thickened around the two figures facing each other on the sidewalk, a bird twittered in the weeping willow overhead, and the air grew close and humid as low clouds rolled in. Nothing and no one stirred on the ghost-town street, except for a cockroach scampering across the sidewalk, disappearing under the pile of foul carpeting.

If one more thing goes wrong, the woman moaned, coming up for air, peering out of her trance through red-rimmed eyes. She jerked her head from the pavement with a decisive nod and sat up.

You telling me, sister.

I just reached back for one split second to steady the tombstone—

"The tombstone?"

—but it broke and now my mother is going to kill me.

I waited three months to get this trailer from FEMA, Kelly said, peeling off his rubber gloves, finger by finger. "And another month to get the key. The government shitheads brought me three different trailers without keys, can you believe it? I just got this one connected, I’m gutting the house where my family lived for twenty-two years, and I’m about to settle into my cozy toaster oven, make myself a cup of goddamn joe and finally feel at home for the first moment since the storm, and along come you and your tombstone, and splat, back to square one. He slapped the gloves down on the sidewalk. Goddamn."

I work for FEMA so maybe I can—

Oh, ain’t that cute. He jumped up, flailing his arms. You work for FEMA. Do they pay you by the hour to go around knocking down the trailers soon as people get them set up? Wouldn’t want the locals to get too comfy now, would we?

A plaintive bird trilled above in the weeping willow.

You look familiar. She knitted her brows, studying him hard.

So do you. He squinted, trying to place the face of the woman who had just upended his life. Don’t sound like you from here.

I went away for a long time. A bit of color seeped into her cheeks. Where did you go to school?

Warren Easton. Of course, he knew she meant high school. This was the inevitable question that popped out when natives first met and tried to identify each other.

Did you know Marky? He’s about your age, maybe a few years older. She actually smiled. Marky Naquin?

Know him? I dated his sister.

"Wait a minute, I am his sister."

You Nicole Naquin?

I don’t believe it, she squealed. Are you . . . Kelly, Kelly Cannon?

Can’t believe running into you like this.

Don’t forget, she said, I’m the one who ran into you.

For the first time in five months, Kelly threw back his head and laughed.

During the next twenty minutes, it was 1975 and they were both teenagers again. There he was on the dance floor in his shiny wide-collared shirt cranking